All posts tagged ‘Puzzle games’

My addiction to puzzle games is nothing new, so let’s just jump right into this edition of Core Dump, featuring six puzzle apps for iOS that are all completely different from each other. Sliding snakes around, turning oddly shaped wrenches, and planting giant bears in a settlement: you’re in for a treat!

Say “physics-based game” and usually games like Angry Birds come to mind: something that involves gravity and collisions. Games like Happy Hills, Kickin’ Momma, or Saving Private Sheep all involve forces that fling projectiles which then bounce around. Of course, there are also Rube Goldberg-type games that involve dropping marbles or other balls along ramps, chutes, and conveyors to trip switches and reach a goal (like BallFallDown, for instance).

But physics isn’t just about velocity and gravity, right? There’s also fluid dynamics, friction, and electromagnetism, for starters. Here are a few of the physics-based iOS apps I’ve been playing lately. Some fall into the more traditional type, but there are a few that stand out with more seldom-seen game mechanics, too.

The goal of Wooden Path is quite simple: create a continuous wooden path from one bank of the river to the other. Accomplishing this goal, however, will have you racking your brain for a solution.

Wooden Path is a new puzzle game for the iPhone from bitroots, and it’s a great one for fans of sliding-tile games. On each of the game’s 74 levels, you’re presented with a screen showing various wooden bridges and other specialized blocks. There’s a light blue grid on the surface of the river that shows where you can slide things, and you move things around until you complete the path from bank to bank.

A slightly more challenging level, with teleporters, vanishing blocks, and more.

The early puzzles are quite simple, usually just a matter of sliding some blocks around and getting the bridges matched up. They teach you how the various types of blocks and objects work, but aren’t a real challenge to solve. For instance, there are teleporters that can be used to move blocks (and occasionally, rotate them). There are some teleporters which limit the color of blocks that enter them, and color the blocks that come out of them. There are star blocks which will vanish if all of them are in one contiguous mass, and some colored blocks which will vanish if you place matching-colored blocks at each of the portals. Some blocks can only be moved along one dimension, so you’ll have to work around those.

I’m going to start out by saying that I really dislike Wil Wheaton. Why? Because he blogged about Dungeon Raid, a $2.99 iOS app that has taken over my Friday morning… and likely many snippets of my Friday afternoon.

Dungeon Raid is addictive. It’s got monsters and gold and potions and armor. It’s got leveling. It’s got special treasures to buy to increase your shield strength and hit points. It’s got special classes with unique abilities and special monsters with their own devious tricks to play. And while there are plenty of similar games out there (and I’ve played quite a few), I just like the simplicity of this little app. Continue Reading “Dungeon Raid App: No Dungeon Master Required” »

Back in October I told you about a little iPhone game called Trainyard, a perfect blend of simple rules and devilishly complex puzzles. Well, you’ve had some time to solve all of those, so I present you with another dizzying puzzle game to tickle your brain: Woozzle.

Don’t let the funny name and lush green leaves fool you — this is a serious mind-bender with some real challenges. The controls are elegantly simple: tap a container to rotate it 90 degrees counterclockwise, slide a marble to launch it out of a container along the available path. Marbles enter the from the top, one at a time, and your job is to send them through the convoluted paths to their destinations.

Match up four marbles of the same color in a container to clear that container (which then flips over to its “natural wood” color), and clear all the containers on the board to pass the level.

Of course, if it were just that simple it would hardly be worth playing. As you progress through the 60 levels, Woozzle introduces new features: colored containers which can only be cleared with a particular color; one-way paths or flipping gates; paths that only allow one particular color to pass or exclude a particular color; painters which change the color of marbles as they enter. There are teleporters, color mixers, and even a few levels where entire sections of paths are covered by leaves so you can only follow the marble with careful observation.

A sampling of Woozzle levels. (Click to enlarge)

The colors in Woozzle are rich and eye-popping, and combined with the sound effects really gives the impression of marbles sliding around in wooden channels. There’s some music and chirping birds in the background to help you feel like you’re out in a jungle, but those can be turned off separately if you get tired of them. Each level has three ranks, depending on how quickly you can solve them, and fortunately you can skip past a few puzzles if you get really stuck. (Level 45, shown with all the leaves, has me completely stumped.)

If you like brain-teasers and logic puzzles (and particularly if you enjoyed Trainyard), give Woozzle a spin. There’s a version for iPhones and an HD iPad version (with a different set of puzzles), and free Lite versions (iPhone and iPad) as well. All of them are currently at a reduced price of $.99, so it’s a terrific price for a dazzlingly good game.

I recently came across a relatively new iPhone/iPad app called Trainyard that is a work of art. Well, perhaps not literally a work of art, although the interface is not bad on the eyes — it’s a puzzle game with an excellent design and execution to match.

The basic goal is very simple: get the trains from the outlets to their proper stations. In the beginning, it’s as easy as drawing a line from Point A to Point B, as long as you can match the correct colors. But as you play, it becomes more and more complex. First, you learn how to create branching tracks which switch automatically. Then you learn how to combine trains to mix their colors, or re-paint them with special stations. You’ll get splitters that break apart secondary colors into their primary components. And finally you have outlets that will release multiple trains (often in more than one color) and stations that will receive multiple trains. Do all that in the limited amount of space (and without running into rocks).

The first two sets of levels are so simple that even your young children could play, and learn about mixing colors and branching tracks. But the difficulty level ramps up steadily, and by the end you’ll be running trains around in circles trying to get everything to line up. The tutorials (which can be skipped) are helpfully broken down into short bits and introduced just as they’re needed, so you can get started on the game and learn as you go. In fact, one of the best parts of the game is the way the learning curve is set — it just builds and builds.

And the later puzzles are so deviously designed that it’ll take a lot of trial and error (and logic) to figure them out. What’s great, though, is that there are multiple solutions for most of them—it’s not a fixed, one-answer puzzle, but there’s a lot of flexibility. However, the most elegant solution is one that requires the least amount of track.

You can also upload your solutions from within the app, and then browse solutions on the Trainyard website. While this does mean you can “cheat” and skip levels that you’re stuck on, it’s also a lot of fun to see what other people have posted and to see how your own solution could be improved.

The graphics and sound effects are just right. If you like puzzle games, this is definitely one to try. If you don’t want to buy the full app (currently on sale for $0.99), then grab the free Trainyard Express. The free version has 60 puzzles (compared to the 150 in the paid version) but there’s no overlap. So really, you should get both.

If you like puzzle games and logic puzzles, All-in-1 Logic GameBox is a one-dollar iPhone app that will keep you occupied for … well, let me pull up my statistics here … Whoa! Nineteen and a half hours so far? Really? I should mention that I got this app less than two weeks ago. A big reason for all that time spent is that it’s actually seven different games, each with plenty of levels ranging from introductory to the mind-boggling. Other than Paratroopers, which is sort of a speed and dexterity game, the other games require some thought and logic.

The graphics on it are nicely done: the menu screens have a wood-grain background with a sort of peeling-sticker icon, and all the in-game graphics are simple, clean and actually attractive. The interface works pretty well on most of the games, although I did have a little trouble with accuracy of tapping and dragging on Paratroopers and Liquid Measure at times.

AppZap, the developer, promises future updates so I imagine there will be more levels as they’re released. Here I’ll give you a brief rundown of each game included. If you like puzzle games, it’s definitely worth checking out.

In software terms, Babylonian Twins is practically ancient. When it was first created, you (or maybe your parents) were finally playing Mortal Kombat on the Sega Genesis (or perhaps the bloodless version on the SNES). It was the age of a slew of newfangled game consoles like the 3DO and the Atari Jaguar. What, you don’t remember those? That’s what makes the existence of Babylonian Twins such an unlikely story: it survived, despite being programmed for the Commodore Amiga in Baghdad, where economic sanctions (and the death of Commodore) pretty much killed the project. Against all odds it’s been given a second chance, with a bit of a facelift to hide those wrinkles and embarrassing blip-bloop sound effect. The game’s creator, Rabah Shihab, reassembled the original team through the magic of the Internet and got to work, first on an Amiga demo which was released on YouTube, and then on its current incarnation on the iPhone and iPad.

The game itself is vast, gorgeous, and challenging. You play both twins, Nasir and Blasir, as they battle an evil sorcerer to bring peace to the kingdom. Set in ancient Babylon, Babylonian Twins has a wide variety of settings which are (according to the creators) based on history books; the original graphics were made by an architecture student from Baghdad University. Unlike most iPhone games I’ve played, the levels are huge—it really feels more like an old console game than the casual games that usually appear on a mobile device, and it’s great. Many of the levels have taken me around fifteen minutes to complete the first time through, and that’s if I survive the first time. With only three lives per level and almost no way to replenish health, you have to be pretty careful to make it through. (More frequent checkpoints have been promised in a future update so you can pause more often if needed.) Continue Reading “Babylonian Twins Journey From the Amiga to the iPad” »